< After years in a Syrian ISIS camp, a 10-person American family is back in the U.S.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Early this morning, a small group of people, half of them children, quietly arrived in the United States from Syria. They had been held there for years in huge desert camps for refugees and relatives of ISIS militants. It took complex negotiations to get them here to restart their lives in the U.S. Sacha Pfeiffer of our investigations team is here with the details. Good morning, Sasha.

SACHA PFEIFFER, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.

MARTIN: Tell us about this group.

PFEIFFER: So there are 12 people total, half of them are kids. They're from two separate families. One is a single family of 10 people that had been held in these camps for years. It's a 50-year-old mother and her nine children, ages of 7 to 26. The mother, named Brandy Salman, had lived in the U.S. She married a Turkish American man. According to one of the kids, the father said he was taking the family to Turkey at a camping trip - this was 2016. Instead, they ended up in Islamic state territory in Syria. The father gets killed. The wife and kids end up in one of the camps, as we said, for years. Michel, it's unclear what the family's relationship with ISIS was, if any, but a U.S. official says that one of the adult daughters was arrested this morning. So that's a developing story.

MARTIN: OK. So that's family number one.

PFEIFFER: Yes. There are also two boys, ages 7 to 9, from a separate family. They're the sons of a Minnesota man who fought for ISIS, is now back in the U.S. being prosecuted and will soon go to prison. He was badly injured in Syria and later surrendered, and when he surrendered, he had these two boys with him. One is the biological son of his by an ISIS widow he married. The other is the son of that woman by a previous relationship she had - so his stepson. These kids ended up in an orphanage. They're now in the U.S., so all these 12 people are now back.

MARTIN: So you said - look, as you said, this is mostly kids. So why were these such complicated negotiations? What was the fear here? Tell us about that.

PFEIFFER: Yeah. So there is a fear. The fear is that these camps in Syria are a big problem. Forty-five thousand people are there from about 70 different countries. Babies continue to be born there. It's a terrible environment - little health care and schooling, they can be violent. The U.S. and other countries want to reduce the population of the camps by bringing people home. But that can be a tough sell because many countries are afraid by bringing them home, you'll be importing terrorists. The U.S. says these people can be reintegrated with the right support, and the U.S. says the greater risk is letting them stay there. They could be the next generation of ISIS fighters. Here's how the State Department's deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, Ian Moss, puts it.

IAN MOSS: The longer we leave them there, the more vulnerable they are to radicalization and to exploitation by extremists and folks that have an extremist agenda, and they're vulnerable. I mean, certainly, these kids are vulnerable.

MARTIN: So, Sacha, as you said, there are about 45,000 people in these camps. We're only talking about a dozen people coming home. How does this help?

PFEIFFER: Right. And I should note that as part of this operation, it was a global operation, another 11 people were returned to Canada and Finland and the Netherlands. Eight of those 11 people were children. So in total, 23 people get out from Canada, the U.S. and Europe. That is a tiny dent in a massive problem. But the U.S. and those other countries hope that by bringing all those people home, it will set an example for the rest of the world, and more countries will start to do the same and shrink the populations of those camps.

MARTIN: So we have about 25 seconds left. Do we know what the circumstances are that the family will be living in? They already have family in the United States...

PFEIFFER: Yes.

MARTIN: ...That they'll be living with?

PFEIFFER: Correct. Both of them - in the case of the Minnesota man, his grandkids - or his kids will be living with their grandparents until he gets out of prison. So his grandparents - or his parents are going to be foster parents to his children. In the case of Brandy Salman, she and her family will be living with her mother in New Hampshire is what we know so far according to a U.S. official.

MARTIN: That is NPR Sacha Pfeiffer. Sasha, thank you so much for this reporting.

PFEIFFER: You're welcome, Michel.

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